No More Mercury In My Mouth But Oh Lordy the Pain!

Oh my God I am dying here. I am in such pain. I was pretty okay before, at least I thought I was, in fact I was going to tell all of you that I felt embarrassed for having been such a wound up ball of anxious wining depression in my last post, but then this roaring pain came on from one of the teeth the dentist worked on today. Oh God! I hurt so bad I took two Tylenol, then I took three Advil, then I took an Excedrin and then finally I broke down and took an extra strength Vicodin and I am still dying here. I don't want to bother my dentist this late at night and even if I did what could he do? I think I'll just take another pain pill, Oh fuck. Maybe I need a root canal on this tooth because the nerves are obviously flipping out over the insult of having worked too near them. The pain starts in this one tooth, radiates to the surrounding teeth, then from there it goes burning along my jaw and then up into my sinuses, up into my head, and even down towards my neck and shoulder. I don't ever remember having a toothache this bad, thank God I took the Vicodin before it got this bad or I don't know what I'd be doing right now, probably crying.

I looked down at my little orange and white Tommy Kitten and he was gazing up at me with such trust and love. When I look at my cats, when everyone is well and no one is in the hospital or seriously sick, I sometimes think I am the luckiest person in the world. We are a tribe, these cats and me. How is it that so few people get this?

After having spent eight whopping hours at the dentist today, four for myself, then four more with Beau, I managed to find the energy to run a few fun errands and this cheered me up whereas before I had been feeling so depressed and freaked out by my Mom's sudden and relentless obsession with forcing me to save money in ways that are too sudden and totally unreasonable. She has told me that she will not be giving me any more money out of my own trust fund, my own income that I have inherited, to pay for my housekeepers anymore. She has said, "Give her two weeks notice and that's it," and poor Anna, she needs this job so badly, she moved into a bigger apartment for her kids so they could have their own bedrooms when she got this job. All of this because she feels I spend too much time on line and thinks that if I am forced to take care of my own animals without any help that I will get rid of them, and that it will keep me off of the computer, the evil, bad, bad, bad computer. She thinks that if I don't have a housekeeper that I will suddenly become a gourmet vegetarian cook and will make meals for Beau and myself. She just has this whole fantasy about how letting my housekeeper, (who I am completely dependent on, since I have had one for fourteen years), go will turn me into more of the kind of person she wants me to be, basically her.

I've been hesitant to write about this because really, how can I complain about my fear of trying to run my little city farm here without help because I am in pain most of the time, when there are people here with cancer, and people whose partners have been suddenly paralyzed while they themselves are missing limbs. I mean for Fuck's sake, I have it so damned easy compare to the majority of people I know. Nevertheless I do have health problems, I am in constant chronic pain, I won't bore you with the details, but I have become fairly dependent on having an assistant/sister/friend here to help me do everything, to help run our lives, and to be a sort of companion/sister to keep the loneliness at bay. Having to suddenly transition away from having someone here in two arbitrary weeks when I have been living this way for fourteen years, because Mom just got it in her head that this is a good idea, is so unfair and super frightening for me. She is like a little girl when she talks to me about it -- she just doesn't get how genuinely panicked I am and keeps saying weird things and talking about how good this is going to be for me because the computer is soooo bad. When I tell her that one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other, she just won't hear me. She thinks I spend all day on line shopping while Anna does all the work around here. She doesn't understand what goes into running this household at all. Oh God, I'm hurting and I'm rambling and I don't want to belabor this, I guess I just wanted to get it out.

I just keep turning it over and trying to trust that there is some greater force at work here and that maybe in some way my mom is right and we will get through this, but I am so tired, so very tired, of being at the mercy of my Mother's sudden and arbitrary decisions.

Anyway, after weeks of anxiety, because Mom keeps extending the two week fire-your-housekeepers notice, for some weird reason, maybe because I was relieved to have made it through this big awful dental day, and after having had another fight on the phone with my Mother, I suddenly felt kind of hopeful and cheered and enjoyed running a few errands. I drove while Beau slept in the car. We went to the pharmacy to fill prescriptions. I stopped by my favorite knitting store to say hello to the owner, Jennifer, I wanted to show her Plucky Fluff's and Neau's yarn, but she wasn't there. I went to my favorite bakery and got a tea -- it amazes me now how the routine of buying a cup of tea makes me feel so good, I'm getting the whole Starbucks Coffee Bean thing now, finally, then I went to Whole Foods and bought some pretty orange paper lantern flowers to put in a black vase on our porch, a dozen bags of dried sour cherries to give to my friend who loves them, (I put one on each stair of the stairs that lead to her bedroom and when she came out and saw them she screamed because she loves them so much, that made my day,) I also bought some really good old cheese, big green olives and these cupcakes that I love. I ordered the hay bales for our yard. I went to The Woods and bought a black pumpkin. It's soo cool, it looks like it's old, rotten and burned, but it's some kind of velvety black Japanese hybrid. I said hi to the son of the owner who is best friend's with Aimee Osbourne and we hugged and chatted for a while. Then I finally took Beau where he had been wanting to go which was to Best Buys to reward him with a game for having been good about the dentist.

PPS: Two Vicodins down and no way will I risk taking another, this may be a long night. Thank God I have George Noury to keep me company. Oh yeah, and he's talking about one of my favorite subjects tonight -- Freemasonry.

PPPS: Thank God, (I say God a lot don't I? Oh well, what do you expect from a gal who had thirteen years of Catholic indoctrination? I guess a lot of swearing, hair dye and frequent references to sex and God,) for my friend Phil, he kept me company last night while I talked myself down from a very panicky and super anxious place. Just one more instance of how blessed and lucky I am.

PPPPS: Okay that second Vicodin seems to have almost done the trick, the pain is more distant but of course now I am seriously stoned and liable to say something really stupid like when this woman at the yarn store today asked me if the blanket I had been knitting for my husband had turned out well. I replied, "Who me? My husband ran off with a stripper, so I'm not planning on doing too much knitting for them." Then this prissy uptight bitch woman, (unfortunately there are way too many of these pursed lip, I-Think-I-Am-Better-Than-You types at Jennifer's Knits,) said haughtily, "Was that too much information for you? I know it was for me." And she said this to the other women as if I wasn't even standing there, as if my having said something odd just removed me from the planet as far as she was concerned.

I know it's weird and kind of shocking for people to hear me blurt this out but that's part of the fun of it and has taken a lot of the sting of the pain out of it for me. Being able to joke about it got me through it. Say, does anyone out there know of a place in this country that I could move to where I would be accepted and loved for being myself, Wacqui warts and all, but just a little more hospitable, environment-wise, than Burning Man? I'm serious, I so want out of here.

PPPPPS: Nope, spoke too soon, now I'm just very, very woozy but still hurting. What's it gonna take to kill this thing?